Everything You Need to Know About Setting up Your WordPress Blog

With every passing day, the world of the blogosphere looks more enticing as a potential job opportunity. If not this, you might want to consider blogging as a means of getting some side money or just as a vessel for your voice to be heard. Whatever your motivation may be, all you need to do is set up your WordPress (WP) blog properly and here are few tips and tricks on how to do it.

Hosting When it comes to your WordPress Blog, what you need to take care of first is hosting that comes down to two choices. The first one is to go with free hosting and the second one is the so-called self-costing, and believe it or not, this is a tough choice to make. Free hosting is more frugal than self-hosting, but it has some major drawbacks. For example, your domain name will have phrases like .blog or .Wordpress tagged along, unless you purchase a domain name of your own. Also, with it, you have less control of your blog since you cannot freely (oh the irony) download and install plugins. Luckily, self-hosting, which is a far superior option, is quite affordable and usually costs under $5 per month.

Installing WP Next, you need to install WordPress, which is one of the easiest tasks you have ahead of you. To start, simply go to the wordpress.org and download the latest version of the program. Once the download is complete, upload the files to your web server, what is best done with the use of FTP (file transfer protocol). After the upload has finished, create a MySQL database, as well as a user for WP. When you’ve completed this task, all you are required to do is configure WordPress, which you can connect to this new database. As soon as the installation is complete, just setup your new website.

Setting a Theme Now, one of the most important reasons people use WordPress in the first place is a fact that it offers a lot of customized themes. There are some themes that are offered to you by default and they can be found in your theme directory. In order to access them, just go to the admin area, open the dashboard, open appearances and then proceed to themes. From here on, it is a walk in the park. On the other hand, if what you have in mind is getting a custom theme, you will have to upload it first. In order to keep up with the trends, here are some of the best WordPress themes you can use for your blog.

SEO Optimization After you have all of these basic things covered, the next thing you need to do is optimize your blog for search engines. Now you need to think about the issues like looking at how responsive a theme is, instead of just observing what it looks like. Another thing you should care about is your domain name, and having a keyword in it can seriously improve your online visibility. Still, this is not the only thing you should look for when making a great domain name. Avoiding numbers, hyphens and similar confusion-infusing elements is almost as relevant. One more thing – while some people have a dilemma over whether to go with traditional www or not, according to Google, this does not affect a page’s rating.

Making Your First Posts The final step involves uploading your first posts, but even this is not as simple as it may seem, as following Google guidelines is of utmost importance. A good idea would be to keep your first few posts around 500 words or more and to watch out for the keyword density. What this means is that your keyword phrase should never be more frequent than 2.5 percent of all content. For comparison, in a 600 words post, a keyword should repeat itself under 15 times. As for the pictures and the video content you use, you need to worry about two things: The first one is their optimization for your page and the second one is any potential copyright infringement.

Conclusion: From all of this, one can clearly see that setting up a blog is not a rocket science. However, keeping it supplied with quality content and maintaining its functionality at an admirable level is far from easy. In other words, those looking for some “easy internet money” should probably turn their interest elsewhere. Blogging is a serious job and should be considered that way.